I hope that everyone has sent their responses to the Home
Office's consultation on `entitlement'
(i.e., identity) cards. Here's mine (from a few weeks
ago):

I am absolutely opposed to the introduction of
`Entitlement' or identity cards in the UK.

As a Czech acquaintance remarked,

Here in the Czech Republic we have ID cards (since
Adolf Hitler instituted them for us).

Of course, the actions of the current UK government aren't
comparable to those of the government of occupation in
Czechoslovakia in 1938--45, and I understand that the
government has ruled out the possibility of a card which
must be carried at all times and produced on demand.

But that's not to say that a future government might not
decide that a compulsory card was, after all, a good idea,
and build upon the outcome of this current proposal to
implement a more repressive scheme. And in any case, it's
clear that the proposed cards are expected to become
generally used for identification, with the result that it
will become effectively compulsory to carry one. This sort
of `voluntary' requirement, effectively enforced by the
private sector without appeal to law, could be even more
damaging to our freedoms than a real compulsory scheme.
After all, the last compulsory scheme was eventually
repealed as a result of public dissatisfaction; but that
might not be possible with a scheme which has been taken
to heart by the banks, utility companies and other
powerful actors in the economy.

The consultation document claims that the identity card
will help to combat identity theft and other forms of
fraud. It is not clear why this should be the case. The
document states that every individual will be issued a
unique identifying number; it seems reasonable to suppose
that the result of this is that all sorts of unrelated
organisations will start to use this number to identify
individuals, with two consequences:

it will be easy to steal somebody else's personal
number, since the third parties holding personal
information keyed by the personal number won't
necessarily secure their computer systems as well as
they should;

practically, identity theft could be accomplished
simply by stealing the personal number.

This is essentially the situation which prevails in the
United States where every individual has a `social
security number', and identity theft is trivially
accomplished by obtaining somebody else's number.

The consultation document also advertises at great length
the virtues of `biometric' information for authentication
or identification. This is an even worse idea than the
card itself. Biometric information is a terrible choice
for an identification scheme, because it is impossible to
revoke or replace it. For instance, if the card stores a
thumbprint and somebody manages to copy my thumbprint and
use it to spoof (say) a bank auto-teller -- which turns out
to be rather easy with current fingerprint readers, which
can often be fooled by a simple photograph of the print --
there is no way for me to get another thumb to replace the
one which has been compromised. So victims of biometric
identity theft will be stuck with their compromised
authentication data.

Nor would it be safe to assert that the introduction of
such technology could be delayed `until the technology is
mature'. It is inconceivable that future biometric
authentication technologies will not be susceptible to
some sort of spoofing. Criminals have tremendous
incentives to invent ways to subvert authentication
devices -- much greater incentives than the vendors of the
devices. And, of course, technology is advancing all the
time, so an authentication device which is safe and secure
today may be trivial to subvert to a future criminal who
is using the technology of two or ten years from now.

As a final comment, it is worth pondering this: with what
types of states do we associate identity cards? Do we
regard them as a feature of democratic states where the
populace is free and a tradition of rights prevails; or
with authoritarian states whose governments demand the
right to peer into the affairs of their subjects lest they
take it upon themselves to throw off their oppressors?

No state with an old and stable tradition of democracy and
the rule of law enforces an identity card system. There is
no reason that Britain -- the oldest and most stable of
the lot -- should be the first to do so.

Yours faithfully,

(signed) Chris Lightfoot.

-- the whole thing is futile, of course: we'll get
identity cards if Blunkett wants them whether we like them
or not, just like anything else the Dear Leader decides.
But at least this way I get an MI5 file. Hmm....

You'd have thought that a politician would know the
meaning of the term theft, right? Think again:

Anne Campbell, MP,
House of Commons,
London,
SW1A 0AA.

Dear Anne,

It has recently been brought to my attention that Dr. Kim Howells, MP,
Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport
the present Government, made comments in the news media criticising remarks
made by Robbie Williams, a singer, about `Internet piracy' -- that is, the
making by individuals of copies of songs using `file-sharing' services.
Dr. Howells apparently said: (source: Sky News and elsewhere.)

``Williams should not be defending theft, and this is real theft.

``It is the equivalent of going into a record store and shoplifting
material on sale.''

As you will be aware, theft is the taking away of the property
another, with the intent permanently to deprive. It is clear that,
though often a violation of copyright, the Internet `piracy' to which Mr.
Williams refers does not have the character of `theft' because there is no
`intent permanently to deprive'; in fact, when one member of the public gives a
copy of a song to another, nobody has been deprived of anything. You will also
be aware that the violation of copyrights is a matter for the civil courts, and
it is not clear why Dr. Howells should choose to involve himself in arguments
about it.

I am at a loss as to how Dr. Howells came to make such a misinformed statement.
I am sure that he did so in error, rather than by way of attempting dishonestly
to identify a large group of people who have committed no criminal offence with
thieves and other criminals who are rightly despised by members of the public.

I hope that the remarks made by Dr. Howells do not constitute a statement of
Government policy. I hope that you can confirm for me that they do not, and
that it is not the intention of the present Government to promulgate further
lies of this type about law-abiding citizens. I imagine that it is too much to
imagine that Dr. Howells might apologise for his outrageous claim.

Which came first, the oranges or the colour orange?
Oranges, apparently. The OED
identifies the first adjectival usage in c. 1600, but the
first occurence of the fruit from 1044. Thanks to a
colleague for this observation.

Here's the the eventual outcome of the incident in
September 2002 during which a motorist deliberately ran
his car into me on a Zebra crossing, and the Police
investigation of same. At the time, I contacted the
Police and described the incident in a letter.

I was invited to make a statement by the Police in
December, and did so at the beginning of January (I had
been out of the country). My statement essentially
recapitulated the details in my original letter, though I
was slightly surprised that the statement took two and a
half hours to give and resulted in almost nine pages of
handwritten ungrammatical prose. Ah well....

The Police contacted me last week to inform me that they
had decided not to proceed with any formal action against
the motorist, who had been identified and had admitted to
his part in the incident (although he denied actually
hitting me with his car; `Criminal tells lies to Police'
is, I suppose, not news). A statement was also taken from
the passenger in the car, who turned out to be the
daughter of the motorist.

I understand that the decision not to proceed with any
formal action was informed by the expectation that a
conviction would be hard to secure given that the only
third party witness was a relative of the accused.

I am informed that the motorist in this case was surprised
to find that the Police had taken an interest, however
slight, in his behaviour. Whether this surprise related to
the long delay between his attack on me and the Police
response, or whether he did not feel that his criminality
ought to have attracted the curiosity of the Police, I
cannot say. The constable who interviewed the motorist
told me that he felt that even the investigation without
any subsequent formal action would have a deterrent effect
upon my attacker.

It's hard for me to identify any useful lessons here. I
think that the most important one -- which most of us, on
some level, already know -- is to obtain the names of
witnesses, since this ought to make prosecution easier. At
the time, I was too shaken to do so. So the second most
important lesson is, I suppose, to remain calm even in the
face of outrageous and frightening behaviour by other road
users.

Everyone is writing Bayesian spam filters. This is
my effort. So far it seems to work OK, but no proper
statistics yet.

Dubya has declared
a ``Sanctity of Human Life'' day. Has this man no
self-awareness at all?

I had the misfortune to listen to Any Questions
on the radio today. It's truly horrifying that a
random selection of second-rate politicians can
easily be provoked into demanding that asylum
seekers be rounded up and put into -- let's not beat
about the bush here -- concentration camps while
awaiting `security screening'... and that the
audience put up with this and even applauded it.

As so often, the Tories are to blame,
but why is it that our supposedly liberal government
is pandering to this shite I cannot understand. I
suppose the real answer is that they're not at all
liberal; in fact, they're just as reactionary and
racist as the other lot, but of course they get to
dress up their offensive views in some sort of crazy
amalgam of working-class consciousness and Hampstead
intellectualism which somehow justifies dismantling
what remains of the post-1945 settlement while from
time to time dropping bombs on people with whom they
disagree.

It's got cold again. Is now the moment to start
advocating my plan for an enormous Truman Show style dome to
enclose Cambridge and give it a more amenable
climate?

But I want to take you into the world of very low
Reynolds number-- a world which is inhabited by the
overwhelming majority of the organisms in this room.
This world is quite different from the one that we
have developed our intuitions in.